The Shield: a novel (3 page)

I realize that this will make your current campaign that much more difficult. We are ready and able to assist you. I assure you that with our help you will be able to finalize this campaign within a week.

To allow us to help you, please contact me on this s
ame frequency using the same code.

Please do not send any reconnaissance missions into our territory. This includes aircraft, ground troops or naval vessels. Any and all such units will be destroyed. 

Please give my best regards to Moshe Dayan of the Palmach.

General Wilson looked up at his adjutant: “Is this some kind of joke?”

“Sir, it’s certainly not our joke. The message came in on the HQ command frequency in the code our Jerusalem HQ is using.”

“
Major, please take down my orders.”

“
Sir!”

“
One. Immediately switch to a different code in all our radio communications.

“
Two. Send a message to HQ Jerusalem in the emergency code on our alternative frequency. Ask for an explanation of this message.

“
I am afraid that we either have a madman or a traitor in Jerusalem or else the Germans have broken our codes.”

After the adjutant left Wilson returned to the map. What a ridiculous notion – finish the c
ampaign in a week, especially with the Luftwaffe and the French fighter planes getting more active and dangerous. Time travel! Definitely a madman. He hoped that this person would be found soon so communications with HQ could get back to normal.

***

“Sir.” It was the major again.

“
Yes. What’s new from Jerusalem?”

“
We received this message in response to our transmission. As ordered, we transmitted on the secondary frequency and used code Z.” Code Z was high security and considered unbreakable – also a nuisance since it took so long to encode and decode messages.

Wilson took the slip of paper and read the message.

To: General Maitland Wilson

From: General Gad Yaari

I am not surprised that you did not believe my first message. I would not have believed it either. I suggest that we meet. This will remove any doubts you may have and will open the way for cooperation between us. If you will come to the village of Alma ash Shab, my adjutant will meet and escort you to a vantage point that will convince you of my truthfulness.

Please respond on this or any other frequency and feel free to use any code you wish.

General Wilson looked at his adjutant: “Major, what do you make of this?”

“
Sir, I am not certain, but there may be something to this message.” The adjutant looked uncomfortable. “I tried to contact the RAF in Jerusalem, but got no response. As a matter of fact, there is no radio traffic from any of our forces in Palestine. Just before I came here we got a report from an Australian patrol on the Palestinian/Lebanese border in the area of Naqoura. They claim to have observed movement of troops in strange looking tanks. As you know, we have no tanks in this area.”

“
Very well, major. I need intelligence. Try again contacting the RAF in Palestine. Contact the RAF in Gaza and in Transjordan. Ask them to fly over Palestine - preferably over Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv - and report back as soon as possible. Also send a patrol into Palestine along the Mediterranean coast, from ” - he looked at the map - “
Naqoura. Report as soon as you have anything”.

In the next hour the RAF lost four planes trying to fly over Palestine. Two were lost soon after takeoff from the Gaza aerodrome, and two were shot down when they approached the Jordan River from the direction of
Amman. The patrol that left Naqoura was stopped at a checkpoint by strange soldiers and told to turn back. The Australians did not argue – the four menacing tanks, two on each side of the road, the fortifications and the decisive and aggressive, though polite, behavior of the soldiers was very convincing.

***

“Sir, we have information from our patrols.”

“
Go ahead major,” Wilson said impatiently.

“
The RAF reports that it lost four planes in an attempt to fly over Palestine. Their Group Captain in Amman is not happy, though he lost no pilots. He has a story of one strange fighter intercepting our planes and shooting them down carefully and deliberately.  It seems that the same fighter, or an identical one, took down all the Gaza planes as soon as they were airborne. They seem to have had no chance against him. He came out of nowhere at a crazy speed, flew a couple of circles around them and then, when they did not change course, shot them down.

“
The motorized patrol was stopped a couple of miles south of Naqoura. They saw strange heavy tanks as well as fortifications. The patrol was turned back by forces in uniforms close to ours in color but of a different cut. They also carried unknown weapons.”

General Wilson did not cherish the idea of asking Cairo for instructions. After all, he was the commander there only a short time ago, but there was no choice.  He was stumped by this unusual situation, and Cairo might have additional information.

“Major, please send our exchange with this General Yaari and the intelligence we gathered to General Sir Archibald Wavell in Cairo. Ask him if he has more intelligence on this matter.” Wilson was not going to ask General Wavell for orders directly.

The answer he received was short: “At this time we cannot verify your story and have no intelligence to share. Act as you find necessary. Do not forget your main objective.”

Cairo was obviously preoccupied with Rommel, in no mood to solve mysteries. Wilson decided to send a message directly to this General Yaari character and see what happened. If things were clarified later, he would think again about the invitation to meet.

From: General Wilson

To: General Yaari

As a show of good will I would appreciate if you would destroy the battery of 75mm cannon that have been pounding my forces for the last two hours. Their coordinates follow.

***

Liat woke up Gad Yaari. It was just after six in the afternoon and he felt rested. Several hours of sleep refreshed him enough to feel human again.

“What’s up?” he asked
,
“and what time is it?”

“
It’s 18:14. We finally have a request from Wilson. I transferred a copy to the Air force commander and he is waiting for instructions.”

“
Show me the exchange. I also want a report of what’s been happening.”

Major Cohen presented Gad with a couple of pages containing the radio exchange with Wilson and Wilson’s exchange with Cairo HQ as well as a summary of events up to the moment.

“I must say our historians seem to know a lot and the cryptographers are not bad either.”

“
Sir, the universities have extensive archives pertaining to WWII, particularly in this region. They knew the military frequencies and some of the codes. The other codes are not very difficult to break if you have powerful computers, or so my husband tells me.” Liat’s husband was a professor of applied mathematics at Tel-Aviv University and supposedly knew what he was talking about.

“
I see that the Air Force has the two Kfir jets above Syria as I requested. Please tell them to do as Wilson asked. Remind them that they are not to be seen. They may be heard though.” Gad Yaari smiled.

***

“Sir, we have a report from the Free French.”

“
Go ahead, Major.”

“
They report that the 75mm battery is gone. It just went up in flames. No friendly planes were in the area. We received another message from General Yaari. He says that if we let his forces know what we need, they’ll take care of it as quickly and efficiently as they did with the artillery battery. He gave us a number of frequencies to use so that field units can request support directly.” Wilson nodded in resignation. “Do as he instructed. Give the information to the Free French as well as to the Australians.”

***

Thomas Harvey, the U.K.
ambassador to Israel, was unhappy. His embassy had lost contact with London in the early morning, and contact could not be restored. Now it was noon, and he was to meet with the Israeli Foreign Minister. Harvey suspected that the time travel story as reported on the radio and in the official ministry communiqué was some kind of an elaborate hoax, but he could not figure out why the Israelis would tell such a tall tale. In any case, the Foreign Minister had a lot of questions to answer! Harvey had served in Israel for three years now and was still not sure whether this was a promotion or if there was someone in the Foreign Office who really did not like him. He wasn’t an anti-Semite, he told himself; some of his best friends were Jews. On the other hand, he never really liked Jews either. Objectivity and neutrality were his line.

“
Good day, Ambassador,” the Foreign Minister said. His tone of voice was cool. Thomas Harvey thought that the minister did not particularly like him.

“
Good day, Minister,” he responded.  “I have a number of questions. The first is why are you jamming our radio and telephone to London?” He let his voice show a trace of indignation. The U.K. was not a superpower but it was not third class either and a small country like Israel should show respect.

“
Thomas,” the Minister said, “please understand that we are in a state of emergency and I can’t answer questions or, as a matter of fact, give you any information whatsoever. You will use your own sources - which I know you have - to verify the situation. The only thing I can say, emphatically, is that the public announcement about our unfortunate time travel incident described the true state of affairs. Tomorrow we will present the information we have to all the ambassadors. I am sure that the invitation is waiting for you at the embassy. I will be glad to see you tomorrow.” Then he left.

Thomas Harvey was so stunned that he made no objection. Only on the way back to the embassy did he think of all the things he should have said in response. He also realized that something extraordinary had happened and that he’d have to use every intelligence resource the embassy had to find out what was really going on.

***

The Foreign Minister was in a hurry. The government was meeting in fifteen minutes and he did not want to be late.  Traffic in Jerusalem was light. He thought that people were still stunned by the mid-morning announcement and preferred to stay home after work listening to the radio or watching TV, hoping to learn something new.

“Shimon,” he addressed his driver, “how are things going with you?”

After several years of spending time together in the car they had a friendly relationship. Shimon, representing public opinion, was a good sounding board for ideas that the Foreign Minister wanted to check out before proposing them to the government.

“Fine,” the driver responded.  “We were wondering, my wife and I, why we hear so much jamming on the radio. It reminds me of the Soviet Union in its glory days. And speaking of old times, should we expect food shortages soon?”

“
Well, as you know we are surrounded by lots of hostiles, the chief being the Nazis, not too far away. I assume we will stop the jamming as soon as we figure out another way of preventing critical information from getting out. As to food: I don’t think we will have shortages, but there will be changes. For example, most of our long-range fishing fleet is back in the future, so don’t expect to see much canned tuna or any other deep sea fish on the shelves.”

The minister was glad to see they were arriving at the government building. These were questions he did not want to contemplate. He had enough problems
of his own.

***

Amos Nir looked at the full cabinet. It did not include members of the opposition. They were expected to join after negotiations, but that would take a couple of days, maybe weeks.  The elections two years ago had given his party almost forty percent of the seats in the Knesset, so he did not have to pay too high a price for a stable coalition. As of now, his was one of the smallest governments ever – only seventeen ministers, all present today.

“
Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to open this meeting by summarizing the discussion of the previous Defense Cabinet meeting.” The previous meeting had been only several hours earlier, but it seemed an eternity.

“
We decided to make an immediate public announcement about our strange temporal status. There was really no choice about it. Anybody with a radio would be able to receive broadcasts on the AM band and conclude fairly quickly that those from outside the country were not coming from our time. This is especially true for the segment of our population that speaks several languages – which is most of us. People with satellite TV lost their reception and will soon discover there are no satellites. Our border villages can look out their windows and see changes. Withholding this information would only have damaged our credibility and caused panic.  We really need the trust of the people now.

“
The government decided to immediately suspend our transmissions on all civilian bands and start jamming all private outgoing radio transmissions to prevent sensitive information from getting to our enemies.”